Bungalow 25′s anti-cancer campaign in Madrid uses 700 ice statues of people (which melt in the sun, obviously) to illustrate the point that skin cancer kills 700 people a year in Spain. More at Adverblog.

Nice tagline. But since when does reading news online or getting it from a television news source make you less smart? And the punchline of the ad — “Because a little depth looks great on you” — makes me think newspaper reading might thicken my love handles.

Smart sold 2,556 Smart Cars in the first half of 2011, which is 25% fewer than the sold in the first half of 2010. In July its new owner, Mercedes-Benz USA, launched a TV campaign for the brand. “The approach may be working,” says Mediapost, “Smart reported an uptick last month versus last September: 469 ForTwo cars delivered, compared to 422 vehicles sold in September 2010.” A new spot launched earlier this week.

But you sort of have to wonder — is TV advertising the right approach for a car company that sells fewer than 6,000 cars a year? MINI sold that many cars in the US in a single month, just 3 months after its North American launch in 2002. And MINI spent a mere $13 million that year, none of it on TV.

Created by Amsterdam-based artist Lucy McRae along with synthetic biologist Sheref Mansy, Swallowable Parfum is essentially a capsule containing synthetic fragrant lipid molecules that mimic the structure of the fat molecules naturally found in the body. When those lipids get metabolized by the body’s enzymes, fragrant molecules are released and excreted through the skin’s surface through perspiration. The skin, then, serves as an atomizer for the tiny droplets of fragrance that are left behind, and the strength of the resulting scent is determined by the individual’s acclimatization to temperature, stress, exercise or sexual arousal.

That can’t be good for you. Though I’m assuming the crude-oil-colored goo that’s dripping from the pores of the woman in this commercial is just a special effect for marketing purposes.

Nestle’s latest commercial for Beneful dog food to run on German TV includes sounds that appeal directly to dogs. From the Wall Street Journal:

Although the company has yet to show that using such a novel audio technique in commercials pays off in terms of sales and profits, its efforts, which have been tested this summer in Germany and are this week being extended to Austria, are based on science. Researchers found that some sounds used in the commercial, although some are inaudible to human ears, are appealing to dogs, which may prompt them to wag their tails.

I wonder if one of the German TV networks saw this coming and surveyed its viewers to prove that a big percentage of them are dogs.

Fashionistas who are following the latest runway collections being shown this month have the opportunity, beginning this season, to buy some of those looks, from designers like Diane von Furstenberg, Marc Jacobs and Derek Lam, right from the Web site of Vogue magazine…. Fashion magazines are suddenly getting into the retailing business.

Some high-end retailers aren’t thrilled to see competition coming from the media partners who cash their advertising checks.

But, hey, wait a second. Haven’t brands themselves spent the past five years — especially as they venture into social media — trying to reinvent themselves as content publishers? When I was at Federated Media we described our “conversational marketing” services as exactly that — “we work with brands to create media” and “brands must become publishers.” The NY Times suggests that the practice is now mainstream:

Mr. Granger [Esquire's editor-in-chief] said that many magazines were making similar moves because retailers were starting to move in on their turf. The new Barneys catalogs, photographed by big names like Juergen Teller, look more like an issue of W, with clothes shown on New York celebrities, and shopping online at Net-a-Porter looks more like flipping through the pages of Harper’s Bazaar.

It’s very hard, even for an experienced magazine publisher, to do what Vogue does. Just like it’s really really hard, even for a veteran retailer, to knock Barney’s off the block. The odds are slim that Conde Nast will dominate high-end retail any time soon, or that we’ll cancel our subscriptions to W because Nieman Marcus catalog has displaced it.

So I love to see both sides adding to the competitive fray — publishers trying to be retailers, and brands trying to be publishers. Increased competition usually leads to innovation. Maybe, in their efforts, some publisher’s will lose their editorial credibility (and then their audiences and then their ad support), and that would be sad. But I think it’s more likely that publishers like Vogue, Esquire and Style.com understand that it would be suicide to pimp out their editorial credibility, and so they’ll find a way to execute these new ad partnerships without losing their souls. Maybe they’ll even find a new business model that supports quality digital publishing.

(Disclosures: My employer, Luminate, is a company dedicated to making images interactive. Publishers use our image-applications platform to provide their end users with apps that enhance images with relevant content and services. One of the applications lets users scroll through products in the picture, and click out to a retailer if they’re in a buying mood.)